Leaderboard Zone

Back from the holiday break, we look at data’s influence on culture; glass, both as a material for transmitting bits, and as a wearable interface; and the (im)permanence of data.

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How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood — The Atlantic
Alexis Madrigal and Ian Bogost do a little datamining to uncover the grammar of Netflix: 76,897 combinations of overly specific genres to tailor to every taste. It’s a great story of data journalism, and of the emerging influence of data on our culture. And they even built a generator from the data, which offered me “Hitman Coming of Age Stories.” Read through for the Perry Mason puzzle at the end: “The more complexity you add to a machine world, you’re adding serendipity that you couldn’t imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature.”

The spread of glass — Benedict Evans
A concise and interesting metric about the spread of glass as the transit for our bits: “It’s all just glass with a data connection.”

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass — Wired.com
Some interesting observations from a guy who wore Glass for an entire year – namely that he grew to really hate having to look at his smartphone. As for me, I’m compiling a list of all the places I consider briefly but decide not to wear Glass out.

Do We Want an Erasable Internet? — WSJ.com
Do we assume the permanence of data, or not? This discusses the differences between a “forever internet” versus “erasable internet.”

Target confirms breach: 40 million accounts affected — ZDNet
This story got a lot of coverage over the holidays, but the most interesting thing here is that Target apparently stored CVV codes, which shows that if the data can be stored it will be stored, even if it’s not supposed to be.

We need to talk about TED — Benjamin Bratton
Criticism of TED talks oversimplification of complex issues and memification of ideas isn’t new, but it has never taken the form of TED talk before… #meta.

Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower — The New York Times
The New York Times editorial board came out in support of classifying Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower (as opposed to a traitor) and calls for clemency. We tend to agree.